The Altar of Victory and the Basilica Crisis

Two confrontations with the court of the boy-emperor Valentinian II defined the first half of Ambrose’s church-and-state career. In 384 the pagan senator Symmachus petitioned to restore the Altar of Victory to the Roman Senate house, framing his case as a plea for religious pluralism; Ambrose answered with two letters and prevailed. In 385–386 the Arian dowager empress Justina demanded a basilica in Milan for Homoian worship, and Ambrose, refusing to surrender a church to the state, was besieged with his congregation through Holy Week — the standoff during which, to sustain the people, he introduced the antiphonal hymn-singing that made him the father of Latin hymnody.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

The Altar of Victory (384)

The Altar of Victory stood in the Curia Julia, the Roman Senate house, where senators had for centuries burned incense before the golden statue of the goddess Victory as they convened. It had become the symbolic flashpoint of the long contest between the old religion and the new. Constantius II removed it in 357; Julian restored it; and in 382 the emperor Gratian removed it again, also stripping the public subsidies of the pagan cults and the privileges of the Vestal Virgins (Symmachus, Relatio 3; McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 151–172; Dudden, Life and Times, 1:256–270).

The altar’s history is the history of the long imperial retreat from the old religion in miniature. Augustus had placed the statue of Victory in the Senate house after Actium; for four centuries it presided over the deliberations of the curia, and the senators’ offering of incense before it was less a discrete cult than the sacral frame of the Roman state itself. Constantius II had the altar carried out in 357 but left the statue; Julian restored it in his brief reaction; and Valentinian I and Valens, tolerant of the senatorial cults, let it stand. Gratian’s removal of 382 was thus the culmination of a deliberate program: under Ambrose’s influence and his own convictions he withdrew the state stipends of the priestly colleges and the Vestals, confiscated the temple endowments to the treasury, and — in a gesture of high symbolic weight — declined the robe and title of pontifex maximus that every emperor since Augustus had borne (Zosimus, Historia Nova 4.36; McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 151–157; Williams, Ambrose of Milan, 202–210). The disestablishment Gratian began Theodosius would complete, his laws of 391–392 forbidding sacrifice and the cult of images outright (Cod. Theod. 16.10.10–12) and ending, in law, the public religion of a thousand years. The dispute of 384 falls in the middle of this arc: a rearguard petition against a policy already two years in force, addressed to a court whose direction was set.

After Gratian’s death, in 384, the pagan aristocracy made its bid to reverse the policy. Their spokesman was Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, prefect of the City of Rome, one of the most distinguished men and finest orators of the age — and a kinsman of the still-Manichaean Augustine, whom he had recommended for the Milan chair of rhetoric. Symmachus addressed to the boy-emperor Valentinian II his Third Relation (Relatio 3), a state paper of great beauty pleading for the restoration of the Altar and the cult subsidies (Symmachus, Relatio 3; trans. in Croke and Harries, Religious Conflict in Fourth-Century Rome).

Symmachus was no mere figurehead but the head of the senatorial establishment of the late fourth century. Born about 340 into one of the great pagan houses, he had been proconsul of Africa, was praefectus urbi in 384, and would reach the consulship in 391; contemporaries reckoned him the foremost Latin orator since Cicero, and his vast correspondence — nearly a thousand letters edited by his son in nine books on the Ciceronian model — survives as the finest record of aristocratic society in the age. He was bound by blood and marriage to the inner circle of the pagan revival, kin and connection to the Nicomachi Flaviani and the great houses of the city. It was Symmachus who, as prefect, was asked by the court of Milan to supply a professor of rhetoric for the imperial capital, and who in 384 forwarded the young African Augustine for the post — the appointment that brought Augustine within hearing of Ambrose’s preaching and so, indirectly, to his conversion (Augustine, Confessions 5.13.23; McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 167–170; Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome, 353–398). The man who pleaded for the gods thus stood, unknowing, at the threshold of his great Christian adversary’s spiritual life.

The heart of Symmachus’s case was not a defense of paganism’s truth but a plea for tolerance and tradition. Rome’s greatness, he argued, had been built under these rites; the customs of the ancestors should be kept; and no single creed could exhaust the divine. His most famous sentence puts the case for religious pluralism with lasting force: “Uno itinere non potest perveniri ad tam grande secretum” — “One cannot arrive at so great a mystery by a single road” (Symmachus, Relatio 3.10). He gave it an image: “we gaze up at the same stars, the same heaven is common to us all, the same universe surrounds us.” His boldest stroke was rhetorical: he put the plea into the mouth of Roma herself, the eternal city personified as a venerable matron addressing the emperors — “Let me live after my own fashion, for I am free. This worship subdued the world to my laws; these rites drove Hannibal from the walls and the Senones from the Capitol. Have I been preserved for this, to be censured in my old age?” (Symmachus, Relatio 3.9–10).

Ambrose answered in two letters to Valentinian II, Epistula 17 and Epistula 18 (CSEL 72 and 73; Maurist numbering retained by NPNF). The first, written before the Relatio was in his hands, warned the emperor against lending his Christian authority to the restoration of an altar of idols and threatened, in effect, the displeasure of the Church: a Christian who restored the altar would come to the church but find no priest to admit him, or one who refused (Ambrose, Ep. 17.13–14 [Maur.]; trans. NPNF II/10). The second, having obtained the Relatio, is a point-by-point refutation. Against the appeal to ancestral custom Ambrose set the progress of truth: “all things have made progress” — the world itself was once young and grew to maturity, and shall religion alone stand still? “What you knew not, we have come to know; what the world in its old age did not grasp, has been revealed in its riper years” (Ambrose, Ep. 18.23–28 [Maur.]; trans. NPNF II/10). Against the plea that the same divine is reached by many roads he set the exclusive claim of Christ. And he answered Symmachus’s prosopopoeia of Roma with his own counter-speech for the personified city, an aged and now wiser Rome who disowns the superstitions of her youth — “I blush for the rites I once kept… no age is too late to learn” — turning the eternal city from advocate of the gods into penitent convert (Ambrose, Ep. 18.7 [Maur.]; trans. NPNF II/10). He met, too, the claim that the loss of the subsidies had brought famine as the gods’ revenge by observing that the seasons keep their own laws and the years of plenty had not waited on the temples. The petition was rejected at the Milan court, and the Altar was not restored (Ambrose, Ep. 17–18; the brief later restoration under the usurper Eugenius, 392–394, ended for good after Theodosius’s victory at the Frigidus).

The contest did not stand on Ambrose’s letters alone. Behind the bishop of Milan stood Pope Damasus of Rome and the Christian members of the Senate itself, who were by now a substantial and possibly a majority part of that body. When Symmachus claimed to speak for the Senate, the Christian senators answered that he did not: they had not been consulted, and they would not attend a curia whose altar required them to witness pagan sacrifice. Damasus is reported to have procured and forwarded to Ambrose a counter-petition of the Christian senators repudiating Symmachus’s embassy, which Ambrose cites to the emperor as proof that the prefect’s plea was not the voice of the Senate but of a faction (Ambrose, Ep. 17.10 and Ep. 18.31 [Maur.]; Prudentius, Contra Symmachum 1.608ff. later versifies the Christian senatorial majority; McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 166–167). The episode was thus not, in its own day, a simple confrontation of “pagan Senate” against “Christian Church,” but a struggle within a divided aristocracy, in which Ambrose could plausibly claim that the larger and rising part of Rome’s own governing class was already with him.

[Disputed: the older narrative reads the affair as a grand last stand of paganism against Christianity; Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (2011), argues that it has been considerably over-dramatized — a limited senatorial petition, not an epochal religious showdown, and that Symmachus’s own eloquence has inflated its retrospective importance.] What is not in doubt is the principle Ambrose asserted: that a Christian emperor could not, without unfaithfulness, fund or favor the public worship of the gods.

The Basilica Crisis (385–386)

If the Altar of Victory was a contest with paganism, the basilica crisis was a contest with the other Christianity — the Homoian or “Arian” party that still held the patronage of the court through the dowager empress Justina, mother of Valentinian II and the power behind the boy-emperor’s throne (see The Man and the See on the Homoian inheritance of Milan, and The Western Anti-Arian Struggle on the doctrine at stake).

The crisis unfolded across two successive years, and its chronology repays attention. The first demand came at Holy Week of 385, when the court required Ambrose to hand over the Basilica Portiana, the church outside the walls, for the Arian worship of Justina’s household and the Gothic soldiery of the court; Ambrose refused, and the demand for that year lapsed without seizure (Ambrose, Ep. 75–76 [Maur. 21, 20]; Williams, Ambrose of Milan, 210–217; McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 170–196). Over the winter the court prepared its legal ground. On 23 January 386 it issued a rescript granting the Homoians freedom of assembly and making resistance to their worship a capital offense — a law drafted, the tradition holds, by the Arian Gothic jurist and court official Auxentius/Mercurinus in the Homoians’ interest (Ambrose, Sermo contra Auxentium; Cod. Theod. 16.1.4 / 16.4.1, of 23 January 386). [Disputed: the supporting rescript is the law of 23 January 386 (Codex Theodosianus 16.1.4 / 16.4.1) granting the Homoians freedom of assembly under penalty; it should not be confused with the pro-Nicene “Cunctos populos” edict of Thessalonica, Cod. Theod. 16.1.2 of 380, a frequent conflation.] Armed now with the law, the court renewed and escalated the demand at Easter (Holy Week) of 386 — no longer the suburban Portiana alone but, by the height of the standoff, the great Basilica Nova (New Basilica) within the walls as well, the cathedral itself. Ambrose flatly refused to surrender a basilica to the emperor, in a phrase that became a watchword of the Church’s independence: the things of God are not within the emperor’s power. “If the emperor asks for tribute, we do not refuse it; the lands of the Church pay tribute… we render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s; the tribute is Caesar’s, it is not denied — the church is God’s, it may surely not be assigned to Caesar, for the temple of God cannot be Caesar’s right” (Ambrose, Sermo contra Auxentium 35 [PL 16:1018]; trans. NPNF II/10, paraphrasing Matthew 22:21).

He refused, too, to debate the Homoian claimant — the imported Arian bishop Auxentius of Durostorum — before a lay tribunal of the court, denying that the emperor or his officials could sit in judgment on the faith of a bishop: “in a matter of faith… bishops are wont to judge of emperors, not emperors of bishops” (Ambrose, Ep. 75.2 [Maur. 21], to Valentinian II [PL 16:1002]; trans. NPNF II/10).

When troops were sent to seize the churches, the Nicene people occupied the basilica and would not leave, and Ambrose stayed with them. Through Holy Week of 386 the congregation held the building while soldiers ringed it — a siege of song and prayer rather than arms. The most vivid account is Ambrose’s own running letter to his sister Marcellina, describing the crowds, the soldiers, the imperial demands, and his own resolve not to provoke and not to yield (Ambrose, Ep. 76 [Maur. 20], to Marcellina [PL 16:1018ff]; trans. NPNF II/10).

The Birth of the Hymn

It was here, to sustain a frightened and exhausted people through the long vigils, that Ambrose set the congregation to antiphonal singing — the metrical hymns and responsorial psalmody that are the origin point of Western hymnody. The contemporary witness is Augustine, then in Milan and soon to be baptized by Ambrose, who reports that it was “at this time” that hymns and psalms began to be sung “after the manner of the Eastern Church, lest the people should grow weary in the tedium of sorrow,” and that the practice spread from Milan through the whole West (Augustine, Confessions 9.7.15). The full treatment of the hymns themselves belongs to Father of Latin Hymnody; what matters here is that the most enduring legacy of the basilica crisis was not a victory of policy but a form of worship, improvised under siege.

The Outcome

The court backed down. Whether worn out by the standoff, wary of the popular fervor, or shaken by Ambrose’s well-timed discovery of the relics of Gervasius and Protasius in the same weeks (see The See of Milan), Justina’s party did not press the seizure to violence, and the basilicas remained in Nicene hands. The young Valentinian II would, within a few years, abandon the Homoian cause; Justina died in 388. Ambrose had established, in the most concrete possible terms, that a Christian emperor could not commandeer a church or sit in judgment on the faith — the principle he would carry, four years later, to its sharpest application against the greatest emperor of the age (see Theodosius and Thessalonica).

References

Symmachus, Quintus Aurelius. Relatio 3 (the Third Relation, 384). Trans. in B. Croke and J. Harries, Religious Conflict in Fourth-Century Rome (Sydney, 1982); and Barrow, Prefect and Emperor (Oxford, 1973).
Ambrose of Milan. Epistula 17 and 18 [Maurist; CSEL 72–73], to Valentinian II; trans. NPNF II/10. On the Altar of Victory.
Ambrose of Milan. Epistula 75 and 76 [Maurist 21, 20; CSEL 82, extra coll.], and the Sermo contra Auxentium; trans. NPNF II/10 and Liebeschuetz and Hill, TTH 43. On the basilica crisis. (The Maurist numbers 20–21 correspond to the CSEL extra collectionem / 75–76 region; the precise extra collectionem sigla follow the Zelzer concordance.)
Augustine of Hippo. Confessions 9.7.15; trans. Chadwick (Oxford, 1991). On the introduction of hymn-singing during the crisis.
McLynn, Neil B. Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, 151–219. On the Altar of Victory and the basilica crisis.
Williams, Daniel H. Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene-Arian Conflicts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, 210–217. On the Homoian bid for a basilica.
Cameron, Alan. The Last Pagans of Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. The deflationary reading of the Altar of Victory affair, and on Symmachus’s circle.
Prudentius. Contra Symmachum (Against Symmachus), books 1–2; trans. Thomson, Loeb Classical Library. The later Christian poetic answer to the Relatio and on the Christian senatorial majority.
Dudden, F. Homes. The Life and Times of St. Ambrose. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935, 1:256–298.